The problems of the medical system
The problems facing the healthcare system in Romania seem to never end.
Roxana Vasile, 05.01.2018, 13:02
The Romanians, who conscientiously pay their health insurance contributions, hope to benefit in return from at least partially free-of-charge consultations, treatment and medicine, and quality medical services. In reality, however, this has not been the case for a good many years. Amid chronic problems caused by the under-funding of the healthcare system and an acute shortage of medical staff, on the very first day of the year, almost 2,000 family doctors refused to sign contracts with the health insurance houses, leaving almost 4 million people unable to benefit from free and subsidised medicines and referrals to consultants. The doctors who have resorted to this form of protest demand the elimination of red tape in the medical system and more funds for primary care medicine.
The health ministry is also faced with an illegal anti-vaccination campaign carried out across the country. Public health directorates have been asked to inspect the billboards carrying messages against vaccination, despite the fact that vaccination saves almost 3 million lives every year. The measles epidemic Romania is currently faced with must be a wake-up call for everybody, including doctors, the authorities and parents, but these messages are an attack on children’s health, says the health minister Florian Bodog.
Florian Bodog: “Putting up a billboard with the message that vaccination is unsafe is, in my opinion, a crime, apart from being illegal. I believe responsible parents must protect their children. Just as they make sure their children get baptised, regardless of their religion, so they should also make sure their children get vaccinated.”
In other bad news, a reputed Romanian surgeon specialising in kidney transplant, Mihai Lucan, and who is suspected of embezzlement and creating an organised crime group, is under investigation for causing 1 million euros worth of damage to the state. He is believed to have illegally transferred to his private clinic medical equipment that belonged to the Renal Institute in Cluj Napoca, in the northwest. More than 150 patients were reportedly sent from the public hospital to the surgeon’s private clinic, where the cost of surgery varies between 3,000 and 6,000 euros.
Here is MP Emanuel Ungureanu from the Save Romania Union who denounced the practices of doctor Lucan: “We are discovering these days that the country we live in is run by mafia-type groups that include doctors, prosecutors, judges, people from the Romanian Intelligence Service with the complicity of other doctors who know, for example, that in hundreds of clinics around Romania, the patients are channelled away from state hospitals to private clinics. Sick people are robbed of their money and then sent back to state hospitals, where the state is then robbed.”
The health minister Florian Bodog and the mayor of Cluj Napoca Emil Boc have been called in for questioning in connection to the Mihai Lucan case.
